I deliberately delayed my epitaph to Dr Festus Iyayi until funeral rites in his honour are completed. I also want to feel the impulse of the people of his nativity, who, having lost an illustrious son to a struggle he decidedly dedicated and donated himself to – all his life – would missed him as much as the rest of us.
It is my subtle way of paying homage to the land and people who magnanimously ‘shared’ their precious, beloved and begotten son with us in the labour movement. You could see anguish written in the faces of mourners who milled around the velveting green lawns in the primary school premises where dignitaries had gathered to bid finer farewell the ASUU icon. The youths in the community sobered bitterly as they dabbed their eyes with handkerchief in painful loose of man whom they came to known as the beacon of hope and light of the community.
Master Akhabue Stanley has told of late Dr Iyayi’s grand contribution to Ugbekun community in Esan Central and the entire local government in assisting the youths to gain admission into tertiary institutions. “Without Dr Iyayi, a whole lot of us in this community and elsewhere wouldn’t be graduates today. “He gave out money yearly to students to enrol for entrance exams into the university, and this is what the politicians with free money never do for the people in this town”, he mourned, fighting back tears.
What has the government and the Nigeria state done for this community and anyone, he quarried?”. “How long shall we tolerate state instigated murder of our sons and daughters in this manner in Nigeria and, why should Nigeria state derive pleasure in slaughtering its best and brightest at the utter of inept leadership who abdicates its contractual obligation to the electorate?”. Stanley came charging with many more unanswered questions.
This is rightly so since Dr Iyayi’s tragic death raised fundamental issues of state killing. Stanley’s anger is the same feeling in the faces of people who cream around the quiet Ugbekun neighbourhood at the scene and his house where the rites took place. There was anxiety, despair, frustration and hate toward the state. There was no question as to whether he was killed by the murderous Kogi State Governor’s convoy, Mr Idris Wada. Further revelation has emerged; even by the Kogi State Government Hospital Management that a gapping hole has been found around his chest region, which fuelled more suspicion that he was shot at before the head-on-collision occurred before the bus summersaulted.
There was also the story that the state tried and, did monitor the autopsy examination conducted on Dr Iyayi to ascertain the actual cause of his death. He was not the only occupant of the vehicle where he was killed, even though there were negligible injuries sustained by others. Granted that nothing has been left unsaid since he was callously slaughtered by agent of federal apparatus and their willing collaborators in Kogi State. Suffice it to say that Nigerians are aware that he was murdered. We are also aware that his death – like many before it – would go down as one of the previously unresolved murder hanging around the neck of the ever bloodlust Nigeria state.
Dr Festus Iyayi’s killing raised three crucial questions: First, the crisis of tertiary education in Nigeria, second, the issue of ownership of Nigeria roads and the issue of authority killing on the same roads and elsewhere. First, I am not surprised that Prof Iyayi was murdered by the state. Over the years, he has been a sharp excrescence on the flesh of successive governments who made deliberate policies to stave Nigerians off basic education at all level by all means.
The only reason is that the political elites have contempt for education. They want people to remain in ignorance so that they can continue to toy with the destiny of Nigerians. Their calculation has always been that the less educated the mind; the less likely that it would brittle to ungainly governmental policies, less conscious of fundamental Human Rights and such elements yield easily to intimidation, blackmail, manipulated and deployed for notorious uses. This prosaically, has been traced to the root of political violence in Nigeria.
But Prof Iyayi wouldn’t have any of such. He challenged run-down schools system and the vested interests who sought and still seeking to keep the very ordinary Nigerians in perpetual servitude and suborn slavery. Dr Iayi’s main thrust is to make Nigeria a better place for all through undiluted education. He had repeatedly said no to a situation where students were using kerosene stoves in laboratories instead of Bunsen burners, where students were excreting into polyethylene bags and throwing them through the window, where students were standing under trees to receive lectures, where there were laboratories without water, no electricity, where students were doing theory of practical in Engineering and other science-based faculties.
Government allowed the decays and rots in the nation’s educational system on the criminal pretence that there is no money to fund its development. Yet, it spent three trillion naira bailing out the banks; it spent 500 billion naira bailing out the airlines; it spent another 100 billion naira on the textile firms; it even had money to give to Nollywood and the Stock Exchange, it gave 350 billion Naira to private people who arrange deal for them, long after it entered agreement with ASUU.
Even now, stories are rift on the a daily bases of how trillions of oil money meant for development evaporate without trace. We have read in the last two months of the disappearances of N500 billion SURE-P fund; we are inundated with the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor’s cry over the missing $50 billion oil money, the N6 billion theft of pension fraud, the House of Representatives probes of the NNPC unmerited $13.9 billion and N142. 7 billion and sundry others. How come when it comes to education government suddenly says it has no money? What about the money Presidency is allegedly amassing to prosecute 2015 elections? What has come of the fuel subsidy reports; a panel chaired by Malam Nuhu Ribadu appointed by the Minister of Petroleum, Mrs Diezani Allison-Madueke to look into the subject and said about $30 billion of oil money could not be accounted for?
It is shameful enough that Nigeria with huge resource from oil is still spending less than 1 percent of her GDP on education where Ghana, a non-oil producing nation spends about 31 percent of its annual budget on education. This is one of the reasons Nigerians send their kids to acquire education in Ghana. These are not hidden statistics; even the Republic of Benin and Togo have higher levels of spending on education than Nigeria.
Sadly, we have lost such a moderating pimpernel, mentor and an authentic comrade in the person Dr Iyayi. He was an incomparable force who illuminated the nation’s quest for qualitative and quantitative education. He saw education for all as the only means of achieving social justice and a just society through passionate and eloquent advocacy of revolutionary transformation – if possible – through wholesale liquidation of the political class in order to achieve the Nigerian dream.
There are the other issues of ownership of roads and state sponsored killing which brings us to the pre-modernist era or obsolete style of governance in 21 century Nigeria. In civilised climes, roads are built to specific. There are roads designated for official uses, some written: Save Our Souls (SOS) in most cases to ease quick movement of traffic should there be any emergency. But in Nigeria, Presidents, Governors, Ministers and other government officials are either avoiding thier imaginary enemies who had probably lay siege along the distended roads or rushing to catch long delayed flights to avoid the terrible lanes of misery called roads. These convoys are usually express view of living hell, when caught in the bind!
To make matter worse, Abuja-Lokoja road; the only route that leads to the Federal Capital Territory and the only one that connects North to the South has been pathetically under repairs since the late 70s without any head way. It has gone down in history as one of the most blood thirsty Nigeria road by the statistics of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) Going by the records of Ministry Works, since 1999, a total sum of N142.63 billion Naira has been expended on that road without result; due essentially to contracts variations, yet the road remains deplorable with minimal signs of reconstruction.
Nigeria government has maintained its notoriety by either dispatching her critic through road accidents or by other means. A former ASUU President, Mahmud Tukur was wasted in similar circumstances in the 80s on the Kaduna-Zaria road in a very suspicious riddle yet uncovered; Bala Jibril Muhammed on Maidiguri-Bauchi road; Chima Ubani on the Maiduguri-Potiskum road; Abiodun Kolawole on the Ekiti road. Now it is comrade Iyayi on the Lokoja-Abuja road. The case of Chief Bola Ige, Dele Giwa and a host of others too numerous to mention stir us in the face. The altitude of Dr Jonathan Presidency has been: The country can go to ruins for all he cares as long as he pursues his political ambition beyond 2015.
That students have been asked to go back to schools is a mere symbolic reprieve for the long traumatised educational system. Not after a wilful waste of 6 productive months; after female students have become mothers, male students have become armed robbers or kidnappers, some even died. Not after brutally extinguishing – albeit tyrannically – one of the very few radical humanist of postcolonial African literary icon and warrior of protest, for leading the nation’s path unto greatness.
Prof Iyayi was tenancious under very repressive regimes of IBB, Abacha and Dr Jonathan and his head remained unbowed, even though he was murdered at last. Nigeria and Nigerians are worse for it. It is left for the rest of us to submit to defeat or slug it out with the forces of darkness, come 2015.
Written By Erasmus Ikhide
